Five Elderly Dementia Patients Who Played with Dolls

Abstract

It is said that the study of Psychopathology in the elderly ultimately led to the understanding of normal a eing. In our paper, the authors interest focused on the attitudes of ti emented patients towards dolls and tried to understand the meaning of those attitudes. In this paper, dolls were regarded as playing a role to reduce or eliminate existence anxiety. The authors pointed out the importance of understanding the way elderly dementia patients insisted on the existence of themselves in the background of attitudes which are commonly superficially regarded as childish phenomena.